Thursday, July 6, 2017

Russia has as Many as Five Million Homeless, Not the 64,000 Rosstat Reports

Paul
Goble

Staunton, July 6 – Sergey Mironov,
head of the Just Russia Party, says there may be as many as five million
homeless people in the Russian Federation. Moscow experts say that may be too
high, but all agree that the official figure Rosstat gives – 64,000 – is vastly
too low and the real number is somewhere in between.

Milonov offered his estimate, one
based on his survey of the expert community, in support of a package of
measures his party has proposed to deal with rising poverty levels in Russia.
Rosstat’s number is from the 2010 census: the official agency hasn’t collected
any data on this issue since that time.

In reporting this, Anastasiya
Bashkatova, an economics journalist for Nezavisimaya
gazeta, points out that gathering information on the homeless is difficult
for any government, but she suggests that the Russian authorities are
deliberately understating the size of the problem in this case (ng.ru/economics/2017-07-06/1_7023_russia.html).

The 2010 Russian
census listed 34,000 homeless households, “in which,” it said, “were included about
64,000 people;” and officials stressed that their number had fallen since the
earlier enumeration in 2002.But now
that poverty has increased, Rosstat has made no effort to try to find out just
how many Russians are homeless.

The Russian statistical agency has a
long history of understating problems that the regime wants understated,
Bashkatova says.For example, and she
provides detailed from an Audit Chamber accounting, Rosstat has routinely
offered figures that undercount the number of orphans in the Russian
Federation.

One way that Rosstat often
inaccurately describes a phenomenon is by changing the years to be compared.
When it announced earlier this year that 22 million Russians were poor, it
pointed out that a year earlier, although it had not announced this then, 23.4
million had been. Thus, one could say that the situation had even “improved.”

But if one takes a longer period,
then it turns out that “the level of poverty in Russia has fundamentally
increased,” something the authorities don’t want to admit but must focus on if
the situation of those at the bottom of Russian society is to have any chance
of improvement.